I just Googled, Warty Warthog was released October 2004. I ordered a free CD of this to my house, as a teen, and installed it — wiping Windows — without a second thought. What followed, after feverishly owning up to breaking the machine (the DSL modem only worked with Windows), was truly the start of my future in technology, computers and software. Ubuntu has stayed constant with me as many, many things have changed over these two decades.
It also didn't restart the app for me, so took me until I missed the starting of a meeting to realize the workflow was broken, and THEN my launcher app couldn't find the name Cron (IE, the aforementioned uninstall). Then, opened it finally, and had to also redo Google SSO Auth, but there's a malformed request error (that seems to be a Google issue...) and I can't log in.
This outage has been going on for 8 hours at this point, and we can’t actually fail over to a different region. I’m shocked at this from a company who has a product like SQL Server where you pay a premium for reliability.
I just tried to post about this and got redirected here. I am honestly gobsmacked at this from Microsoft. We're paying a premium and expect a solid uptime in return, and I'm at 14 hours down now with no resolution. They're a leading cloud provider with an abundance of resources to mitigate these sorts of issues
I moved over to Render and cancelled Heroku. I didn't mind it before because it was reliable (if not expensive) but this Github fiasco made me move. Happy to get rid.
Paddle is fundamentally different to Stripe. As you said they a merchant of record. Your customers purchase via Paddle, manage the subscription etc via them. Disputes would be via them too. Something to bear in mind.
Sure, the model is different, but that still doesn't make signing up to an impossible promise with unbounded liability when you inevitably break it a good idea.
What happens if Paddle are faced with a customer who is getting snotty about a bug and threatening litigation in an expensive jurisdiction? Paddle apparently have the right under their terms to settle that dispute on whatever terms they wish and then pass the entire cost on to the developers. There doesn't appear to be anything requiring those terms to be reasonable nor anything close to what the developer themselves would have had to offer in their own home jurisdiction or if they'd been selling directly to the customer on reasonable terms. As far as we could see, Paddle don't even have to notify the developer that any of this is happening, they can just send the bill at the end.
If anyone from Paddle is reading this and would like to explain publicly why that isn't an existential threat to every SaaS business using their service and what their terms actually mean, that would be very interesting to read. Maybe something like the above scenario would never actually happen. As I mentioned before, I've heard nothing but positive comments about Paddle from various people I know who actually use it. But in that case, there's no need for such one-sided terms, and it's better for everyone if the legal documents say what you really mean instead.
I've been happy with them so far, although I only have a few customers. The backend dashboard feels a little MVP but everything works well. The checkout flow is also hosted so you just embed that into your app which is nice.
Yes we have, though the terms for vendors that are linked from the main terms page on the FastSpring website don't seem to be the correct ones for vendors in the UK so our current assessment is only provisional.
The FastSpring terms don't appear to create the same risks for us that we identified in connection with Paddle's terms as I mentioned above.
